Fiction coming out of Africa in the twenty-first century is defined by attempts to deal with identity, migration and (dis)placement through figures, memories and images of childhood. These attempts are informed by a four-decade-long historical period politically marked by military regimes and civilian dictatorships. We can trace, through the fiction of “first-generation” “canonical” writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Flora Nwapa, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mongo Beti, Buchi Emecheta, Ferdinand Oyono and Ayi Kweyi Armah, amongst others, renditions of the political angst occasioned by failed nationalist projects. The African nation-state, experienced as a geo-political entity, became a definitive framework for individual and collective aspirations as represented by these writers. It became a site where these aspirations found ontological coalescence. The late 1960s through the 70s however brought forth the literature of disillusionment in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, with key historical moments that began with the toppling of Pan-Africanist ideologue Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966, the Biafran War in Nigeria (1967–1970) and the rise of military dictatorships like Idi Amin’s in Uganda (amongst many others around the continent) aggregating into a crisis of collective imagination towards the African nation-state. These historical events define the imagination of this period, as its literature grappled with the collapse of the presumptions of temporal linearity that come with the concept of the nation as well as its “homogenous empty time”, in the way that Walter Benjamin defines it.1 The idea of the nation-state in Africa therefore came under critical revision, re-populated with the existential crisis represented in Ayi Kweyi Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). This crisis captured in Armah’s text dramatizes and at the same time ironizes the emptied temporalities that bind efforts by “the man” to provide any meaningful labour as a railway clerk, in the face of relentless cycles of corruption in the Ghanaian civil service. The accelerated time of a fast-growing global economy, occasioned by the raging Cold War, put Africa’s own project of achieving a belated modernity into temporal crisis, especially given the unassailably static geo-political zones that are the legacy of imperial/colonial map-making. These zones quickly turned into cartographies of violence, creating a time markedly defined by forced migration across the continent and without. Subsequently the focus of the project of identity began to shift from nations to individuals, who invariably felt their identity overdetermined by their experience of the crisis of nationhood.
Abdourhaman Waberi famously called his generation “children of the postcolony”,2 to refer to writers like him coming of age during this time and into the difficult political process of decolonization. This was the late 60s, 70s and 80s, a time of wide-scale displacements of people, resulting in postcolonial African diasporas in Europe and America. This book is about the childhood experiences of this period, narrated by migrant writers who, like Waberi, have come of age, albeit in the new millennium. From decreasing life expectancy, the continent saw the rise of children as forming a substantial part of its population. It was this period that consolidated global media images of broken and malnourished children’s bodies, augmented by the reality of child soldiers and millions of AIDS orphans. But this was also a period of children who left Africa for other continents to live a life elsewhere, many of whom have become the biggest contributors to African literature in the new millennium. This book looks at these experiences of childhood as inaugurating the contemporary imagination of African literature. Put together, these diverse childhoods provide a “set of ideas” in which to map out a category of analysis in relation to the evolving nature of the identity of the continent and particularly its contemporary diasporas.3
The narratives this book reads therefore reflect on childhood, using symbolic figures, images and memories. They present childhood as tropological for understanding and for constructing contemporary forms of identity. Childhood is a set of dimensions that engages with material realities as raced, classed, gendered and sexed social identifications. This book sets out to argue for childhood as a framework within which conditions of critical and conceptual possibility for contemporary African literature can be examined. Childhood is therefore not just thematic; it is a set of ideas foregrounded to grapple with contemporary forms of identity that arise from an embodied pluri-dimensional continental and diasporic experience. These experiences are mediated through the temporal telescope, if we can call it, of the latter half of the twentieth century, but which I argue here as moment(s) of contemporary authorial possibility. I use the word “contemporary” to partially invoke a nominal process of demarcating a temporal category or categories. I therefore look at a selected group of writers published in the twenty-first century, who are considered part of contemporary Africa and its diasporas. This group of writers could be considered part of a “new” tradition or generation.4 Moreover, apart from temporal coevality and the shared diasporic space, each of the writers raises a range of issues in their narratives that, as we will soon see, are critical to an emerging framework in, of and about childhood.
Contemporary African Diasporic Literature: Imaginative Contexts
Inaugurating the new millennium were narratives about migration and diaspora like Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale (1997), a novel that prefigures Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) and also, most recently, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013). These novels construct migrated memories and images tempered by the disillusionment of “failed” postcolonial projects and propelled by aspirations of the “American Dream”. They perform spatial and temporal shifts, with childhood figures and memories experienced in the continent and matured elsewhere—predominantly across the Atlantic. Migrant childhoods like these have become embodiments of contemporary diasporic African identities, formed at the nexus of oil booms and bursts: what Binyavanga Wainaina in his memoir calls “children of the cold war” or, similarly, what Enitan in Sefi Atta’s debut novel calls “[c]hildren of the oil boom”.5 These authors’ narratives register the futures past, foreshadowing this emerging millennial moment, when childhood informs the field of contemporary African literature. As this book will argue, the category “diaspora”, whose cultural turn is eruditely articulated by Brent Hayes Edwards in his influential essay, continues to be redefined by these emergent experiences of childhood in contemporary African literature.6 In many ways, the framework of childhood re-interrogates the uses of diaspora, while at the same time revisiting, refashioning the conceptual and categorical signification of Paul Gilroy’s seminal argument about the Black Atlantic.7
If migration and diaspora create the conditions for contemporary African writers into the new millennium, then the re-emergence of narratives about child soldiers is one of the ways in which the memories of childhood are mediated and narrativized. From such biographical accounts as the memoir literature of Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone (2007), Emmanuel Jal’s War Child: A Child Soldier’s Story (2009) or China Keitesi’s Child Soldier (2002), the kinds of future histories produced in the civil wars and military dictatorships of the 70s and 80s begin to take shape in contemporary imagination. But what is important to note is not just the proliferation of these kinds of narratives in the twenty-first century: it is also that early on, Ken Saro Wiwa’s Soza Boy (1985) already provided the primary literary context for the figure of the child soldier that had, at least in the African continent, begun with the Biafran War. There are also a number of contributions in French West Africa, like Ahmadou Kouruma’s Allah Is Not Obliged (2000). In addition, Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), Chris Abani’s Song for Night (2007), Helon Habila’s Measuring Time (2007), Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2005) or even more recently Ishmael Beah’s Radiance of Tomorrow (2014), all invoke conceptually re-calibrated experiences of memories of war.8 Therefore, in the manner of recent Holocaust studies like those of Marianne Hirsch and Erin McGlothlin, we can begin to talk about “postmemory”,9 and perhaps with regard to their diasporic turn and transcontinental dispersal, these child soldier narratives gain the multi-directionality that Michael Rothberg’s book reflects on in his examination of Holocaust memory studies.10 These memories of war for many of these writers are experienced thro...